I wasn’t in the area, but happened to peek at the Crestline cam and saw the smoke. Also peeked at AJX a short time later and saw the big white X:

Bo,

I appreciate your position, and willingness to help out inexperienced pilots, but the incident rate at our site (including pilots of many different levels) would suggest that relaxing the current protocols any more is asking for trouble. Since volunteering for the board, I can’t recall a single 2 week stretch without hearing about something.

I want the instructors to agree on terms for the site sign offs because they are the ones that are going to be issuing them. The terms in the sign off are a bare minimum for the club to get behind, and they should be encouraged to add their own standards on top of that, since they are allowing those novice pilots to fly without supervision.

I just don’t see how the site would survive if any pilot could show up and put novices into the air. There would be absolutely no enforceable standard that we could maintain.

This is, at the end of the day, a P3 site. I considered it a privilege to fly here as a P2 on my own and jumping through the necessary hoops is just part of the gig – we have to do that with the other aspects of our flying (getting rated, maintaining our ushpa membership, repacking our reserves, etc), and following a few safety protocols to fly an intermediate site is no different. P2 flying options down here in San Diego are not great, but that didn’t mean I ran out to Blossom as a beginner just to get flights in since I could have.

Ultimately the end result, if we can’t all play by the rules, is that we’re going to get told new rules. That’s going to mean no unsupervised P2 flying at all, and I think that would suck.

Yep – those are all great ideas, but likely would not work at AJX (just from a logistical/practical standpoint). For example, we discussed the sticker idea a while back, but a few things that might stand in the way of that working:

• Pilots not wanting to put stickers on their gear
• Someone would need to be on-hand to distribute them
• The stickers would have to be purchased, printed out, and kept on hand somewhere accessible
• Enforcement – a person would need to be on-hand to check

I had sent USHPA/RRG a request/suggestion through their local representation to find a way to push the message (maybe through USHPA instructors, publications like their magazine, etc) of the importance of doing some homework before flying a new site (reading site briefings) and not flying before an in-person site briefing. Maybe if there are others here that would request the same, that this issue would get some traction. Seems like a great article topic for USHPA mag.

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